The Inaccessibility of Cezanne’s Artistic Perspective

The Inaccessibility of Cezanne’s Artistic Perspective In his laudatory essay Cezanne’s Doubt, Merleau-Ponty describes Post-Impressionist painter Cezanne as portraying the “lived perspective, that which we actually perceive,” which is neither a geometric nor a photographic rendition of the world.1 Through a phenomenological analysis of Cezanne’s artistic method, Merleau-Ponty concludes that the painter captures nature in its purest form through “bracketing,” or suspending ready-made judgments about how the world is structured. While Cezanne’s paintings reflect an unconventional perspective, I dispute Merleau-Ponty’s thesis that his art represents the actual perceptual process. I doubt the possibility of suspending the taken-for-granted belief system that even Merleau-Ponty attributes to the “natural attitude” of man. Merleau-Ponty uses Cezanne’s artworks to symbolize and celebrate a state of existence idealized in his phenomenology, yet which I hold as purely theoretical. If Cezanne’s paintings reflect a bracketed awareness of the world, I argue that he does not illustrate the lived perspective.

Merleau-Ponty understands Cezanne’s disposal of traditional and preconceived artistic methods to be an act of phenomenological reduction. Phenomenological reduction requires an abeyance, or “bracketing,” of an individual’s “natural attitude.” This natural attitude is a default mode of experiencing the world according to understandings that Merleau-Ponty argues are formulated and presupposed. Basic spatial categorizations, like viewing the body in terms of the functionality of its distinct parts, is one aspect of knowledge taken up in the natural attitude.

Rather than a body merely “existing” in space, Merleau-Ponty states: “My body has its world, or understands its world without having to go through representations, or without being

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M. Merleau-Ponty, “Cezanne’s Doubt,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. G. Johnson, Northwestern UP, 1993, pp. 63

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subordinated to a symbolic or objectifying function.”2 He elucidates this idea with his description of a woman who, without any calculation, can maintain a safe distance between the feather in her hat and the objects around her which might break it off. By incorporating the feather into her “body schema,” Merleau-Ponty’s technical term for the intuitive understanding of one’s body in space, this woman reveals how beings are inherently embodied in their surroundings. Once the natural attitude is bracketed, Merleau-Ponty claims that an individual gains a primordial awareness of the shared essences and intersubjectivity of all objects and subjects in space. While traditional artists apply analytical methods to understand and then depict their surroundings, Cezanne frees himself from the natural attitude of intellectualizing his surroundings according to reason. By suspending this belief system, Merleau-Ponty concludes that Cezanne paints the “primordial world,” one that puts “intelligence, ideas, sciences, perspective and tradition back in touch with the world of nature which they were intended to comprehend.”3 Cezanne’s painting is therefore an act of phenomenological reduction.

Cezanne’s optics aim to capture both the spontaneity and unity of the senses, constituting what Merleau-Ponty terms the lived perspective. In one of his lectures, Merleau-Ponty states that “in this drive to rediscover the world as we apprehend it in lived experience, all the precautions of classical art fall by the wayside.”4 Cezanne’s lived perspective can therefore be fully understood in relation to his unconventional painting methods. Rather than portraying his surroundings in reference to a chosen vanishing point, Cezanne applies a warped perspective.

The geometric method extracts a single, unchanging landscape from nature that is “held beneath

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M. Merleau-Ponty, “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motricity,” Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D. Landes, Routledge, 2012, pp. 141 3 M. Merleau-Ponty, “Cezanne’s Doubt,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. G. Johnson, Northwestern UP, 1993, pp. 64 4 M. Merleau-Ponty. “Exploring the World of Perception: Space.” The World of Perception, trans. O. Davis, Routledge, 2004, pp.

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a gaze fixed at infinity.”5 Disregarding the notion of a single vanishing point, Cezanne’s landscape is distorted, consisting of multiple dimensions and perspectival directions. MerleauPonty argues that this disoriented perspective mimics the lived, embodied experience of being thrown into a world where “no two objects are seen simultaneously…a world in which being is not given but rather emerges over time.”6 The perfect steadiness of the geometric perspective is a misrepresentation of perception, which is in reality a lively, trembling unfolding of impressions and sensations. This “trembling unfolding” of objects in nature is similarly portrayed through Cezanne’s use of color and outline. Distinctions between the senses are unknown in primordial perception. While a classical artist draws the spatial pattern of the object before filling it with color, clearly defining objects from their background, Cezanne blurs his outlines “in the same way that nature does.”7 His colors, Merleau-Ponty describes, emerge in a manner analagous to how one’s personality is seen and grasped in one glance. In lived perception, colors do not end or fade and divisions between shapes and objects are not carefully delineated. According to Merleau-Ponty, Cezanne’s paintings convey a sense of complete embodiment in the world, which composes the lived perspective.

I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Cezanne is contradictory, as the “primordial world” depicted in Cezanne’s paintings is not analogous to the lived perspective. In his phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty claims that the bracketed, primitive state of being is accessed either in childhood or through illness. The patient Schneider, for example, cannot translate perception into movement through express significations of language. Merleau-Ponty believes Schneider’s enigmatic ailment reveals the primordial, embodied state of being in the world that

5

Ibid, 53.

Ibid, 54.

7 Ibid, 52.

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surfaces when all ready-made human knowledge is bracketed. On the other hand, MerleauPonty claims that “for the normal person, the subject’s intentions are immediately reflected in the perceptual field: they polarize it, put their stamp on it, or finally, effortlessly give birth there to a wave of significations.”8 Merleau-Ponty’s description of Schneider mirrors his analysis of Cezanne. Both figures are awakened to their pure embodiment in the world and no longer take up the natural attitude, which Merleau-Ponty characterizes as “a ruse of Reason disguised as Nature.”9 I argue, however, that reason is the very essence of human nature, as it is precisely what distinguishes humans from other species. Schneider’s state of being in the world strips him of vital aspects of his humanity, as he cannot count, recognize objects, or even play. If the “normal person” views the world through categorization and signification, I argue that the lived perspective, “that which we actually perceive,” relates precisely to the effortless, and very human, natural attitude.

Rather than expressing the lived perspective, Cezanne’s paintings exemplify and celebrate Merleau-Ponty’s theory of phenomenological reduction. While arguing that Cezanne conceives of a universally valid art form, Merleau-Ponty also states that “the painter can do no more than construct an image; he must wait for this image to come to life for other people.”10 For Cezanne’s paintings to be understood and “come to life,” an individual must, like Cezanne, dispose of the preconceptions and judgments that constitute the natural attitude. Since I have expressed my Aristotelian view that human beings are rational by nature, bracketing is an activity contrary to human nature. An act against nature is one that is exceedingly strenuous.

Merleau-Ponty seems to acknowledge the difficulty of phenomenological reduction by admitting

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M. Merleau-Ponty, “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motricity,” Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 133 Ibid, 128.

10 M. Merleau-Ponty, “Cezanne’s Doubt,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, pp. 70 9

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to the strangeness of Cezanne’s perspective: “Cezanne’s people are strange, as if viewed by a creature of another species.”11 The same strangeness is apparent in Schneider’s drawings, as Schneider’s illness causes him to depict the world around him as it reveals itself directly to his senses. Merleau-Ponty believes that an artist like Cezanne is “one who arrests the spectacle in which most men take part without really seeing it and who makes it visible to the most “human” among them.”12 While I understand humanity as reason, Merleau-Ponty uses “most human” to classify those with a primitive understanding of human embodiment. If, however, Cezanne’s artwork can be understood only by those that who manage to bracket their presuppositions, Cezanne does not establish a universally valid art form. The unfamiliarity and strangeness of Cezanne’s paintings reflect the barrier existing between Cezanne’s perspective and that of the normal person. Schneider’s illness, as I mentioned previously, causes him to lose touch with vital elements of his humanity. He acquires a bracketed understanding of the world as a result of pathology rather than a direct suspension of his natural attitude. Outside of such anomalous disorders, bracketing remains a purely theoretical activity. Merleau-Ponty idolizes Cezanne, for he believes that he accomplishes phenomenology’s main task of recapturing the sense of “wonder in the face of the world.”13 I contend, however, that his paintings reflect a perspective that cannot be awakened in the eyes of normal people.

In Cezanne’s Doubt, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Cezanne serves to elucidate his phenomenological theory. By rejecting traditional painting methods, such as the use of outline and the geometric perspective, Cezanne suspends his natural attitude and paints according to how the world “unfolds” in perception. While Merleau-Ponty claims that Cezanne establishes a

11

Ibid, 66.

Ibid, 69.

13 M. Merleau-Ponty, “Preface,” Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D. Landes, Routledge, 2012, pp. xiii 12

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universally valid art form and conveys the lived perspective, I have explained the difficulty of bracketing the judgments and assumptions that constitute human reason. If Cezanne accomplishes the task of phenomenological reduction and paints “how the world touches us,� I argue that his perspective is an inaccessible one.

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